My Very Scary Prediction Came True in 24 Hours After I Made it

I would like to say I am a genius. But I am not. But I could, and apparently did, see the handwriting on the wall in a way that no one in power inside the Beltway, apparently, did.

When the White House escalated its spat with Anthropic by banning access to Mythos by foreigners, I said that they just gave a wonderful gift to the Chinese. 24 hours later the gift was revealed. Now what?

First a bit of a setup.

Why is the White House scared? Here is just one example of why. Even though the White House is having a spat with Anthropic, the government is still licensing their software. Why? Because it is good. Very good. Anthropic put a team of engineers inside the government’s systems and within hours identified “certain vulnerabilities”. Senator Warner, a cybersecurity advocate for years in the Senate, said:

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia had briefly mentioned the testing during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Warner had said, “This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours.” He attributed the information to the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, who is Gen. Joshua Rudd.

Credit: Security Week

The White House’s knee-jerk reaction was to ban Mythos, since that would certainly solve the problem. To be fair, the White House has issued some memos (also known as EOs) to the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community to clean up their security acts, but those memos do not come with either money or people.

Within 24 hours of the ban China’s Z.AI released their version of Mythos. Do you think the White House is going to be able get China to not use it? If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that is available for sale.

Z’s software is far cheaper to use – check out this chart:

And I do mean far cheaper – like only 20 percent OF the cost of Claude.

And while it is not as powerful as Mythos, it is close and it is more powerful than Gemini – again, check out the chart below.

It can even be locally hosted on a PC with only 256 GB of memory. Local hosting means that, once someone gets the code, it is IMPOSSIBLE to put the genie back in the bottle. Credit: Business Insider and YouTube

So, bottom line, like most technology, you can not wish it away via writing a memo. Even a memo that bans the export of something.

They say that people that do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Check out the government’s vendetta against Phil Zimmerman in the 1990s. That vendetta took years to play out but it still blew up in the government’s face. This time it only took 24 hours to blow up.

Bottom line – take this seriously – you are betting your company’s future on getting it right and if you need assistance, please contact us.

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